A known iris identification system for identifying a specific person compares the iris code from the image signal of the iris portion taken from an eye of a person with the corresponding iris information searched from a database for accepting or rejecting a particular person according to the result of the comparison. This conventional iris identification system, however, has not achieved an acceptably high level of identification accuracy.
Moreover, since various iris identification systems have limitations in distinguishing whether it is observing the real iris of a living human, it cannot be safely used with systems such as banking systems, electronic settlement systems or the like due to the high risk of misidentification of forged iris images.